Constitutions are as unique as the people they govern, and have been around in one form or another for millennia. But did you know that every year approximately five new constitutions are written, and 20-30 are amended or revised? Or that Africa has the youngest set of constitutions, with 19 out of the 39 constitutions written globally since 2000 from the region - and the most recent is from Zimbabwe? Africa has also produced a number of recent constitutional innovations. In Kenya, a judicial vetting board recently screened the entire senior judiciary in accordance with the values of its new constitution. Additionally, Kenya's Constitutional Implementation Committee is the first institution of it's kind and now being copied elsewhere.

The process of redesigning and drafting a new constitution can play a critical role in uniting a country, especially following periods of conflict and instability. In the past, it’s been difficult to access and compare existing constitutional documents and language—which is critical to drafters—because the texts are locked up in libraries or on the hard drives of constitutional experts. Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.With this in mind, Google Ideas supported the Comparative Constitutions Project to build Constitute, a new site that digitizes and makes searchable the world’s constitutions. Constitute enables people to browse and search constitutions via curated and tagged topics, as well as by country and year. The Comparative Constitutions Project cataloged and tagged nearly 350 themes, so people can easily find and compare specific constitutional material. This ranges from the fairly general, such as “Citizenship” and “Foreign Policy,” to the very specific, such as “Suffrage and turnouts” and “Judicial Autonomy and Power.”

Our aim is to arm drafters with a better tool for constitution design and writing. We also hope citizens will use Constitute to learn more about their own constitutions, and those of countries around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s first Google Big Tent took place last week, and if the 150 attendees left it with one key clear message, it would be a comment made by Kenya’s former ICT Ministry Permanent Secretary, Dr Bitange Ndemo: “God gave Africa a lot of problems, and now we can use technology to innovate and solve them.”

That optimistic outlook was shared by speakers from across the spectrum of African policymakers, entrepreneurs and researchers. South Africa’s newly appointed Communications Minister, Yunus Carrim, gave a frank assessment of how important the Internet can be for the country’s economic development, telling attendees that “the more people are online, the more successful our e-commerce sector will be.” How South Africa can best maximise this opportunity framed the rest of the conversation.

We saw a number of great examples of African entrepreneurs making the most of the opportunities provided by the Internet. Chike Maduegbuna from Afrinolly showed off his platform for delivering African creative content and Evan Robinson from TaxTim described the typical entrepreneurs story: he couldn’t find a programme to help him with filing his taxes, so he built one himself. These inspiring stories show what can be achieved through hard work and a clever offering.

Meanwhile two South African entrepreneurs warned that exchange controls make South Africa an unattractive investment climate for venture capitalists, dampening the technology sector and driving some of Africa’s greatest innovators out of the country. Justin Stanford of Silicon Cape urged Government to remove these bottlenecks to let technology startups to thrive. Dr Ndemo went as far as to thank South Africa for its regulatory framework because it benefits entrepreneurs in Kenya. Participants were left with a positive impact government can have on the Internet. Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, reminded the audience that the early development of the Internet relied upon close collaboration and support by government. Governments can help researchers and innovators take big risks by providing essential funding. Posted by Fortune Mgwili-Sibanda, Public Policy and Government Relations Manager, Google South Africa.

Google Cloud Platform is used around the world to create and deploy solutions that are affordable, scalable and easy to maintain. These qualities empower developers worldwide to solve local and global challenges with cloud technology.

Do you want to start hacking out a cloud based web app now and you need pointers and hints? If yes , then the Google App Engine tutorial is a good place to start.

The Form+ team , one of the winners of last year’s Google Apps Developer Challenge

If your application is judged the best in your region, within one of the two categories mentioned above, you could win a prize of $20,000! We are devoted to raising the next generation of information technology experts as well as encouraging diversity among software developers. In line with this, we have special prizes for all-female teams -- $2,000 and $1,000 dollars for ‘all-student teams’ that make the second round. Any ‘all female student team’ that makes the second round will receive a prize of $3,000. There are also prizes available for those who are interested in mentoring contestants.